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L’ISLE-VERTE — It was very late when the frail old woman phoned her son. “The building is on fire, come save me.”

By the time Jean-Eude Fraser arrived at the Résidence du Havre minutes later, volunteer firefighters were already there, battling the fire as high winds propelled it through the older half of the privately owned seniors’ home in -25C temperatures. Fraser dragged a ladder to the window of his mother’s room. But it was too late to save her life, the ladder was short and she was wary. A firefighter pulled him away as flames began to lick his clothes.

In a deserted business on Route 132, a woman muses about the fragility of life. “When people move to a residence like that, I think they know that it will be their last move. But they don’t expect it to end like that, so violently,” she says, then asks not to be identified out of courtesy for those who had lost someone dear. One of her business partners lost her father in the fire, but her mother survived by climbing down a ladder. Another close friend lost both her parents. “It’s a small village. Everybody is connected. Everybody knows somebody.”

Like the people of Lac-Mégantic, that other Quebec community struck by shocking tragedy only seven months ago, residents of this pretty village on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence River some 30 kilometres east of Rivière-du-Loup know all too well what missing means.

For the moment, the Sûreté du Québec has confirmed five deaths and 30 people missing. But when a building burns like dry kindling in a matter of minutes, on a night when the wind chill made it feel like -35, families know better than to expect they will see their parents and grandparents alive again. Especially when the overwhelming majority of residents in the 52-unit complex were extremely frail, using walkers or wheelchairs or in the advanced stages of dementia.

It was a little after midnight when Nancy Charron and Christian Morin first heard the cries.

“We were getting ready for bed. My husband asked me why I hadn’t turned off the television before coming upstairs,” Charron says, clutching a grey sweater around her slim frame. “I knew I’d turned it off. That’s when I heard what he had heard, the screams.”

They looked out the window and saw the flames, billowing smoke and the seniors’ home disintegrating before their eyes.

Charron and Morin, who own a grocery store on St-Jean-Baptiste St., live in a big white house just beyond the perimeter where on Thursday afternoon firefighters continued to spray water on the smouldering ruins and police began the investigation into the source of the blaze. Charron’s mother, Mariana Lajoie, 80, lives with them. She suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and has an artificial leg. “Today I am so grateful we kept her, to live with us. If not, she would have been there. She wouldn’t have made it.”

Charron told of the frantic scene as Jean-Eude Fraser tried to save his mother, of the loss of so many other people she knows and loves. Her uncle, Jos Malenfant, 90, is among those known to be dead. Odette Dubé, 80, an aunt on the other side of her family, is missing. At first, she also feared for Malenfant’s daughter Lucie, 54, who is wheelchair-bound. But she was among the lucky survivors who lived in the newer section of the residence, built in 2002, which was protected from damage by a firewall.

In the warmth of her kitchen, Charron recalls the couple’s frantic race outside as they hammered on the doors of neighbours’ houses and a block of apartments they own on du Quai St., just up the road from the section of the residence which was destroyed.

By then, she said, it was already too late to rescue anyone in that part of the building, as a fierce wind blew off the river. Morin went into one of their apartments to help a 90-year-old woman who lives alone on the second floor.

By then, the whole street was awake, huddled in the Caisse populaire for a few hours until firefighters and police ordered everyone evacuated from the area until the fire was under control in the morning.

“The fire moved so fast, it was almost as if there had been an explosion,” said Charron, who woke up her mother and spent the rest of the night at her mother-in-law’s house. She still hadn’t been able to sleep. She can’t help thinking the old neighbourhood, with its mix of century-old wooden houses and brick bungalows, was saved by the shifting wind and the thick blanket of snow that clung to most of the rooftops.

Charron and others in the town spoke fondly of the family that ran the residence, which they said was clean and well-maintained, with a drugstore and clinic on the premises.

“This is a very great tragedy,” Pierre-Andre Fournier, the archbishop of Rimouski, said as he surveyed the damage early Thursday afternoon. Fournier, who has spent summer holidays on the island nearby for which L’Isle-Verte is named, said he knows some families who are grieving. Fournier said he would work with the local parish priest, Gilles Fregon, and community volunteers in hope of bringing them comfort.

But he said the sadness extends far beyond the boundaries of this quiet village.

“All of Quebec is touched by this. Old people who live in residences or who live alone, yes, but also their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren.”

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